This chapter takes its starting point in an outlier. In the Information Highways of theNineteenth Century project – which is based on computer-assisted analysis of millionsof text-reuse clusters within the Swedish-language newspaper press – we mapped theorigin of rapidly spreading text chains. Overall, the preliminary results were hardlysurprising, at least not for anyone reasonably familiar with Swedish (press) history ofthe long nineteenth century. When considering the whole dataset decade by decade, Stockholm dominated as a starting location by a wide margin, followed by Gothen-burg, the nation's second largest city and its main port to the west. However, the1810s stood out. Small-town Jönköping was ahead of Gothenburg and only slightly be-hind the capital. And when narrowing the focus – in the 1810s, where did the 100most dispersed newspaper texts with a circulation duration of a week or less start, that is, where were the most popular and quickly spread texts first printed? – thefindings were even more surprising. Forty of them first appeared in Jönköping, andno other location was even close.

When a news item from Madrid was republished in Stockholm at the end of the sev-enteenth century, it might be a month and a half old. By then, the same passage oftext had travelled and materialised widely across much of the European continent.Just over one hundred years later, a local Swedish editor could boast that he was ableto bring stories to press faster than the official Stockholm newspaper because he hadsecured a steady delivery of German publications to cut from, while his colleagues inthe capital relied on much older English newspapers. And although, throughout mostof press history, cutting must be understood metaphorically, a pair of scissors and abottle of glue became actual tools of journalistic practice during the nineteenth cen-tury. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, the telegraph became an importantpart of the infrastructure for the dissemination of texts that were reprinted. Around1900, advertising campaigns – that is, mass reprinting from a single source, althoughnot reused in a chain or relay-like fashion – were conducted on an almost globalscale. And in the 1930s, by means of stereotype plates or lighter so-called flongs, a suc-cessful Australian author could have three serials running simultaneously in as manyas forty newspapers. Shared newspaper content has a long and rich history.

Today's sharing culture calls for investigations of dissemination, accessibility and content reuse in the past. The book examines the conditions for sharing and disseminating information and stories, how cross-border networks interacted with local actors and how text sharing changed over time. It deals with periodicals from several countries from the 17th century to the present. The chapters analyse verbatim reprints as well as creative forms of reuse, local contexts as well as global infrastructures. Some focus solely on periodicals, others on the relationship with other media. The book combines an empirical focus with a pool of historical and methodological expertise. Digital methods are combined with traditional qualitative methods. Focusing on the periodical press is congenial in that it has to a very large extent consisted of (and still consists of) reused content. Reuse is – despite a long historiographical focus on originality and high-profile journalists and publications – constitutive of what periodicals are. The volume is thus highly relevant to both academia and society at a time when the public sphere seems to be imploding under the pressure of orchestrated yet uncontrollable content sharing.

Seasonal and maritime-related variations in newspaper content and circulation speed have been observed in the literature. This study of Swedish conditions 1790–1829 documents such differences. However, its focus is on domestic circulation and its dependence upon, among other things, incoming foreign news. By combining a computer-assisted method that tracks text reuse with close readings, and by breaking down the circulation into genres and categories of duration, historical change in these variations is made visible. While previous research has emphasised the explanatory power of technology, this article shows that more factors must be considered. Although technological infrastructural advancements were very limited, circulation times decreased and seasonal variations were evened out. This is best explained, this article suggests, by the growth of the system itself, by overall policy changes and by the increased scope for individual actors to change the culture and the protocols of the system, whether intentionally or not.

Does media history really start with a bang? More than just newspapers, television, and social networks, media are the means by which any information is communicated, from cosmic radiation traces to medieval church bells to modern identity documents. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths. From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media - how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. Many media were invented as ways to store and share information, and many have served as powerful tools for administration and control. The concerns raised about media today, whether about privacy, piracy, or anxieties over declining cultural standards, preoccupied earlier generations too. In a playful style, accompanied by more than one hundred illustrations, the authors show us how every society has been a media society in its own way. From antique graffiti to last year's viral YouTube clip, the past is only approachable through media. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history - and about human societies past and present.

Today shared media content and virality represent significant phenomena, but they are not as unique to our current society as commonly assumed. More than a century before the internet, information circulated within a network of newspapers that borrowed texts from both nearby and distant sources. From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, newspapers gradually gained greater significance as a technological medium. However, a fundamental yet often overlooked characteristic of these newspapers was their cut-and-paste nature, which facilitated the widespread dissemination of text items in time and space. Employing a computer-assisted methodology to identify chains of text reuse in over 7.5 million newspaper pages derived from 1629 distinct newspaper titles, Information Flows across the Baltic Sea introduces a comprehensive database of reused texts. It examines the types of content that traversed transnationally and those that remained local. By combining a digitally enhanced bird’s-eye view with meticulous close readings, the book widens our understanding of the cultural relations across the Baltic Sea.